Joint Meeting of the
Los Angeles Chapters of ACM,
and IEEE Computer Society

Tuesday, February 5, 2002
(Note: Special Tuesday Date)

Information Architecture on the Wild, Wild Web: Improving the Structure, Presentation, Accessibility, and Semantics of Our Electronic Content

Presented by Wayne Smith,
Director, Office of Information Technology,
College of Business and Economics, CSUN

Deciphering the W3C alphabet soup (XML, CSS, SVG, DOM, SOAP, RDF, WAI, P3P, etc.) for publishing standards-based documents on the World Wide Web is rapidly becoming a full time job. Moreover, each of the document standards has subtle technological, architectural, design, and organizational touch points. Understanding the genesis, direction, and status of each of the W3C standards is increasingly critical in a highly interconnected world.

Probably the most ambitious initiative yet is the one to build the "Semantic Web"-- that is, to embedded clarity, consistency, and mutually reinforced semantic meaning on the Web. This presentation will summarize these activities and discuss what future "information architectures" IT professionals will be building for their organizations.

Mr. Smith has been involved with computers since 1975. He graduated with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Management Information Systems from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in 1984, and is currently a doctoral student in the School of Information Science at Claremont Graduate University. He has held various positions at CSUN including full-time lecturer in the Department of Accounting and MIS. Mr. Smith co-founded and taught in the desktop technology program of the CSUN Continuing Education program in 1986. He has been a network manager at a large UC campus and has also taught Financial and Managerial Accounting at a local community college. From 1991 to 1994, Mr. Smith supervised a team of programmers who designed and developed a major magazine imposition database and layout computer application for a Fortune 125 printing firm.

Mr. Smith is currently the Director of Technology in the College of Business Administration and Economics at CSUN where he helps manage the technology needs for 5,000 students, 150 faculty, and 35 staff. Mr. Smith has daily contact with students, most notably as the faculty
advisor to the Management Information Systems Association student organization and as a frequent guest lecturer in the College. He has some enterprise-wide involvement as well, including network and server management, implementation of ERP (Peoplesoft) systems, developing custom DSS/OLAP solutions, classroom multimedia design, strategic planning and change management, and IT professional development.

In the past two years, Mr. Smith has been involved in doing pro bono work for other government agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and Santa Monica College, in the area of hiring and selecting quality IT professionals and executives. Mr. Smith is a licensed amateur radio operator and is active in several religious and charitable organizations in the San Fernando Valley.

The presentation at the February meeting was by Wayne Smith of California State University, Northridge. This was a joint meeting of the Los Angeles Chapters of ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Mr. Smith mentioned the wide range of his experience. He was a professor when he was 23 years old, which made him the youngest professor in California. However, he does not yet have his doctorate so he still has to go to school. He is a doctoral student in the School of Information Science at Claremont while he holds the position of Director of the Office of Information Technology of the College of Business and Economics at Northridge.

He started his presentation with a writing sample evaluation that showed a number of errors in style, vocabulary, language, semantics, syntax and grammar. He said you should think in terms of content, structure, presentation and semantics. In a similar way, a number of websites, including that of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM, don't meet all desirable standards.
He presented a "quiz" which asked the audience to match the terms CSS, XHTML, WCAG, RDF, P3P, DOM, and XML with a definition of what they did. The information continuum goes from data or raw facts through information that adds meaning to data. Insight should provide knowledge and if you add foresight you should advance to wisdom. Right now we are working mostly on data and information. The "architecture" continuum runs from use of operators, through building by use of detailed plans, to engineering to solve unforeseen problems and finally architecture to provide strong functions and aesthetics. Information has a lot of characteristics and eventually everything gets political. He discussed when a document becomes a database and vice-a-versa. Most static data exists in documents, but can be converted to database entries and database items can be removed and presented in documents. The relationship between documents and databases is becoming blurred.
Many of the current advances in information architecture are provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee and is headquartered at MIT. It is a nonprofit organization that has 500 member organizations. It is not an official standards body. It has goals of universal access, provision of a semantic web that allows each user to make the best use of web resources, and to provide trust in consideration of legal, commercial and social issues. The key frameworks try to distinguish between syntax and grammar and the vocabulary (mapping between symbol and context) and the semantics (the meaning of the vocabulary). Mr. Smith pointed out that it is very difficult to get to 100%, that accuracy and understanding are two different things. Another difficulty is that more people are using other devices such as wireless phones and PDAs to access the web. The W3C is developing interoperable technologies to meet these needs. One of the major technologies is the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

What can you do to meet these requirements? Strongly consider validating all HTML, definitely use cascading Style Sheets (CSS), consider using the XHTML specification, consider cross-browser and cross-device capability issues and follow "semantic web" activities. Definitely use XML. To learn it read a XML book. Then convert one HTML page to XHTML and validate that one XHTML page. Try a few XSLT examples. Write a simple XSLT file to convert an XML file into an HTML file and write a simple XML schema for a simple address book contact list.

This was a presentation of a complex topic and this description does not do justice to Mr. Smith's excellent presentation, which included many side comments and details on the definitions of things he was discussing.

To obtain the presentation view-graphs go to:
http://www.csun.edu/ws/ieeeacm/
You may contact Wayne Smith by going to:
http://www.grad.cgu.edu/~smithw/

Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary